News You Can Bruise

Sorry to interrupt Month of Kickstarter with non-Kickstarter stuff, but I just discovered that Ian McMillan, who earlier recorded a reading of "Daisy" from Thoughtcrime Experiments, also recorded a reading of the first story in the anthology, "Welcome to the Federation". Way to go, Ian!

Andrew Appel posted about Thoughtcrime Experiments to the prestigious Freedom to Tinker weblog (alas, still not called Freedom To Tinkle). Andrew is one of the authors of "Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine", the paper that partially inspired Ken Liu's Single-Bit Error. Andrew writes of the anthology:

It's not all honey and roses, of course. The authors got paid, but the editors didn't! The Appendix presents data on how many hours they spent "for free". In addition, if you look closely, you'll see that the way the authors got paid is that the editors spent their own money.

It certainly wasn't my intention to hide this fact! But more generally, this is my impression of how things work in the antilucrative world of SF/F short fiction publishing. When I sell a story to a magazine, I get a check signed by the editor. In almost all cases, that money is in some sense the editor's money. The only thing different with TE is that we're not trying to make our money back.

Here's what I mean. Unless you're Gordon Van Gelder or Sheila Williams or Stanley Schmidt, you don't draw a salary. A small-time editor/publisher spends their own money, in quantities that are obscene to them and laughably insufficient to the writers, and then tries to make that money back. There are different strategies for this. Strange Horizons solicits donations and runs public radio-style fundraising drives. Futurismic runs ads. Small print mags sell hard copies and/or subscriptions.

It's your money being spent because you're the publisher: if you make a profit, the profit is yours. The flip side of Stanley Schmidt drawing a salary is that if Analog should sell a million copies one month, he doesn't get to keep the money. It belongs to Dell Publications.

The thing is, you'll never make a profit. Even in the good old days the SF magazines scraped by, and these days are bad and new. Find an online magazine with Project Wonderful ads, look at their PW graphs versus their payment rates, and do the math.

Here's a ridiculously optimistic assumption: let's say ten percent of the people who downloaded our PDF would have paid us ten dollars for it, and that everyone who bought a five-dollar hard copy would have paid ten. We'd still have lost money, to the tune of a few hundred dollars. And that's just the loss on the money we paid out! I'm not even thinking about the money value of our time. The unprofitability of this whole realm of publishing is no secret; it's a running joke. Even people who try to make some money back aren't doing this for money, but because they like the non-monetary returns they get on their investment.

Sometime in the past decade I learned a valuable lesson from Jake Berendes: know when to say "screw it". Do the thing you've been waiting for someone else to do. Removing the commercial angle altogether will save you disappointment and headaches. Spending money to create something interesting for everybody feels much better than losing slightly less money in a commercial venture.

The margins are wider and Thoughtcrime Experiments is now available as a print-on-demand book from CreateSpace. It costs $5.09, which is the lowest price they'll sell it to you. We can order them for $3.05, and Sumana will be getting some of the cheap ones and selling them at WisCon for less, WisCon rules about the dealer's room and whatnot permitting. But $5 is the cost of an F&SF, so it's pretty cheap anyway.

We got a draft of the Thoughtcrime Experiments book but the outer margins were slightly too small, so I had to spend a bunch of time fixing it and now we're going to go through the whole review process again.

I've put up a zipfile containing high-resolution versions of all the TE artwork, suitable for making desktop wallpaper or whatever. I kept this in reserve because I was afraid that my server wouldn't be able to handle the anticipated traffic, and putting up a huge image dump would make things worse. But they make servers a lot tougher now than they did in 2004, which was the last time I personally had to worry about a server handling a lot of traffic, and we're fine. It helps to be serving static files.

Matthew McClintock of manybooks.net has made it possible to get TE in the weird-ass ebook format of your choice. Thanks, Matthew!

The process of creating a POD book is extremely slow by Internet standards, but if all goes well you should be able to buy a print copy by the end of the week. We'll be selling the print copies at cost.

Now, a bunch of boring numbers. TE got a huge amount of traffic today, almost all of which came from three big-name weblogs and one I'd never heard of. Boing Boing posted first and has sent us about 900 hits, John Scalzi posted later and so far we've got a huge 3600 hits from him [Update: this number is totally inaccurate because Scalzi included our image inline. The real number of hits is more like 200], and tor.com posted even later in the day and has sent us about 100 hits. We got 60 hits from Grasping for the Wind, a weblog I'd never heard of but which sent us more hits than higher-profile sites like Twitter.

Also of note are 1200 hits of unknown origin through Google Reader, and 900 from Livejournal friends pages. Add in other sources and the total number of hits is about 69003500.

Why did Scalzi send us so much traffic despite not having the first-mover advantage? Probably because his audience has a higher concentration of print SF fans than BB. [Update: this speculation is moot; see above.] BB readers are more likely to use feed aggregators, which hides their allegiance. Scalzi also simply posts less, so we'll stay on his front page longer. And I bet most of the people reading tor.com had already read BB or Scalzi by the time they saw the link on tor.com. Needless to say we appreciate all links and publicity and appreciation, those being our only payment. I'm not trying to min-max you guys.

How do hits translate into readers? As of this writing the PDF has been downloaded about 1150 times, the master OpenOffice document has been downloaded 120 times, and the zip archive of the website 90 times. By the crudest metric imaginable, about 1/6 1/3 of the people who visited were interested enough to download the anthology.

People seem to prefer downloading the whole anthology for later, but a significant minority are reading the stories online. Stories nearer the top of the TOC get more hits. The first story has 350 hits and the last story only has 50.

The art pages are much more popular than the story pages, which I was expecting. The most popular artwork (with the attention-grabbing title of "Pirate vs. Alien") has 450 hits. "Bio Break" (my personal favorite) has only 200 hits, but that's more hits than most of the stories.

The "random story" feature has only been used 75 times, which I find a little disappointing.

Comparison: usually the most popular thing on my website is Beautiful Soup. During the same period, the most recent version of BS was downloaded about 300 times, and version 3.0.7a (the non-lame-parsing version) was downloaded about 750 times. The documentation was retrieved 500 times. I find this hard to believe, but I never paid attention to BS downloads before, so I gotta go with the data. I think most of these are automatic downloads done while installing some other piece of software with a BS dependency.

Four months since its inception, Sumana and I have released Thoughtcrime Experiments into the commons. We've selected nine mind-squibbling SF and fantasy stories from the slush pile, commissioned five works of art, and packaged the whole thing as a high-quality anthology that you're free to copy and remix. We also wrote an essay describing the process, which you can read if you're interested in how we did it or what the SF/fantasy market looks like from the editor's perspective. Or you can jump right in with a random story.

Thanks to our great authors and artists, and all the other people who helped us out. I'm going to sleep now.

A few left over from a draft I wrote while we were going through slush and forgot about.

• From one of my notes to Sumana: "It was refreshing to read a story about Christianity that wasn't all Ben Hur or Xenogears."
• If your story starts out as standard SF, the dead should not abruptly rise from their graves 80% of the way through. Yes, more than one story had this. Even more strangely, one person made it work, indicating the general presence of exceptions to rules.
• If you come up with an awesome title, use it, don't just mention it. That is, the title should have some bearing on what happens in the story. It should not just be the title of something else within the story. Like, imagine if A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again was not an essay about a trip on a cruise ship (truly a supposedly fun thing David Foster Wallace will never do again, in more ways than one), but in sooth an essay about the recording of a rock album called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. You'd feel ripped off.

  Although if ASFTINDA really was a rock album you'd have no cause for complaint, because we don't expect rock album titles to relate to their contents unless it's a concept album with a narrative. Look, why are we arguing about this?

Okay, all the Thoughtcrime Experiments line edits are out and everyone has been paid. There's one story that still needs some rewrite but we're ready to start laying this sucker out.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to publish some of our hard-won Slush Pile Tips(tm), amazing rules that, if followed slavishly, will launch your fiction into some metaphorical orbit. Rules marked with an asterisk are ones that we still consider to be good advice even though we're publishing a story that violates them.

A lot of the things we've noticed are small things, but just fixing them won't necessarily fix the story. These are more like code smells: signs that something is wrong at a deeper level.

• When writing science fiction about particle physics, take special care to correctly spell the names of elementary particles.
• Is there a gun in your story? Do you feel a need to mention the exact make and model of the gun? The gun may be too important to your story.
• Long scenes that take place inside hallucinations are tiresome. Also symbolic dreams outside of fantasy. Nothing in this scene is really happening!
• Don't put the full name of the POV character at the start of your story. This didn't even make sense in the 1950s. It makes your POV character seem like a pompous ass who thinks in newspaper articles describing their exploits. Obvious exception if pompous asshood is your intention. Sumana says: also an exception if character's name is incredibly awesome.
• Memory erasure/recording is overdone.
• Also people throwing up in bar bathrooms.
• Also airport bathrooms.
• * There is an oversupply of SF stories with a noir style or detective mystery theme. We got a lot of really good ones, but we didn't feel like we could publish more than one. I've written one I think is really good that I can't get published. Now I think I see why.

  It's kind of strange, if you think about it. Traditional hard-boiled noir is pretty much dead, but traditional hard-boiled noir that's also SF is alive and kicking.

• If no one in your story is British, do not call any female a "lady".
• Sumana says: unctuous businessmen should either be over-the-top funny or more understated and realistic.
• * Leonard says: do not use "thumb" as a verb meaning "interact with a handheld device."
• * Any reference to Pandora or Pandora's box is a bad sign. Doubly bad if it's in the title.
• Some infodumps are worse than others. If the premise of your story is laughably ridiculous, an infodump will call attention to the fact. The absolute worst is the gratuitious infodump, which painfully restates that which has already been adequately shown, just to make the reader suffer.

Editing Thoughtcrime Experiments. I've got line edits out for all but two of the stories. Now that Sumana's back from her job interview she's going to send out crits for rejected submissions for which she promised crits, and then (I hope) figure out how to lay out the book so we can put hard copies on Lulu.

I was hoping we could make TE an April 1st project, but it looks like it'll be at least a few days beyond that. Hopefully we can get it out in April, though, because I want to launch my secret writing project in May.

Behold! After painful winnowing of the 25 stories we really wanted to publish, we've sent out acceptance notices to the authors of nine:

• "Goldenseed" by Therese Arkenberg
• "Quantum Tropics" by William Highsmith
• "Friar Garden, Mister Samuel, and the Jilly Jally Mints" by Carole Lanham
• "Single-Bit Error" by Ken Liu
• "Jump Space" by Mary Anne Mohanraj
• "Welcome to the Federation" by Mark Onspaugh
• "The Ambassador's Staff" by Sherry D. Ramsey
• "Daisy" by Andrew Willett
• "The Last Christmas of Mrs. Claus" by Alex Wilson

Barring unforseen catastrophe, that's the lineup. (A couple of the titles are working titles and might change, but I wanted to announce this ASAP.) These are the stories we couldn't say no to. They've all got great originality and execution. I'd put this anthology against an issue of a pro mag any day.

I'm surprised by the variety in the stories. I was expecting to publish maybe two fantasy stories; we're publishing four. Four of the stories are really funny, but none of them are "funny stories".[0] We're publishing a freaking cat story. A cat story that will kick your ass!

Sumana deserves enormous credit, not just for reading the slush pile and sending out over 200 mostly-personal rejections, but for working with me all the way to the final selections. She pulled one way, I pulled another, and the result was a balanced selection.

In addition to the stories, we've also commissioned pieces by five artists. Our instructions, such as they were, were "draw something awesome." The artists delivered. Here's what we've got:

• "Gaia's Strange Seedlike Brood" by Patrick Farley
• "Bio Break" by Brittany Hague
• "Times Square" by David Kelmer
• "Pirate vs. Alien" by Erin Ptah
• "Ninja contra Robot" by Marc Scheff

Go to the Thoughtcrime Experiments homepage for a teaser that includes a low-res version of "Gaia's Strange Seedlike Brood". David Kelmer also put a low-res version of "Times Square" up on his weblog.

[0] I originally wrote that I don't think "funny stories" are funny, but then I thought of some really funny stories we rejected in the final rounds, and realized I was being snobbish. A story can be incredibly funny and still suffer the "funny story" stigma, if there's not a strong plot. That's why Wodehouse's books blend in one's mind into a homogenous mush of hilarity.

Quick TE update. We've winnowed down the list a bit, and have by now sent out offer letters for three stories (funny light fantasy, dark fantasy, space opera). We're pretty close to accepting two more (mundane SF, funny dark fantasy). Interestingly enough, it's easier for us to choose fantasy stories than SF, so those offer letters are going out earlier. I guess that's the flip side of the fact that fewer fantasy stories really stood out for us.

Update: Oh yeah, something I forgot to mention earlier. I have not done a statistical analysis of the prior publication credits of the people who submitted stories to us, because that would be insane. But in general it looks like there is no correlation. We liked and antiliked stories by people who've sold to any given pro or semi-pro market, and by people with no previous sales. But! I did notice two positive correlations. I was more likely than average to enjoy a story by someone who'd previously sold a story to Futurismic or to Adbusters (?!). So there's my taste in science fiction right there.

There are three rails, you say? Let's take a look at this one!

As a writer, I used to feel like I didn't have a good picture of the short genre fiction market as a whole. You send stories in, they come back. You can get together with other writers in a writing group and commiserate, but there's no way that's a representative sample. One reason I started this anthology was to take a good look at a real slush pile and get some sense of what it really takes to have a story worth publishing.

This is a taboo subject, judging from how little editors talk about it. I've been told superficially encouraging things like (not a direct quote) "If you can write grammatical English and tell a story, you're above average." Okay, but that's just saying that baseline competence is relatively rare. How big is "above average" and what does it look like? Magazines don't publish above-average stories, they publish the best. How many people are the best?

It's a truism that the slush pile is huge, that there's a vast oversupply of terrible science fiction. I started Thoughtcrime Experiments partly to test the hypothesis that this oversupply masks a similar oversupply of high-quality science fiction, endlessly circulating from editor to author to editor like some action-packed Sargasso. With no prior fiction-editing experience, can I take a core sample of the slush pile and grab a bunch of good stories that no one else wanted to publish? All for rates that, while decent by industry standards, are penurous compared to the effort it takes to write a story? Is the problem with the slush pile that too much of it is bad, or that too much of it is good?

There were 241 total submissions to Thoughtcrime Experiments. A couple more might come in, from people of whom we asked another story, but they won't affect this general analysis. There were so many stories we've forgotten about most of them by this point, but we have recorded information about our opinions at the time, which I put into a database. My goal for this entry is to try to draw some conclusions about stories in the aggregate.

Here's our review process. A story comes in. Sumana reads it and sticks it into one of five tiers, A through E. A story goes into one tier or another based on how well it satisfies the following fitness function: Would we regret passing up the opportunity to publish this story? From A to E the tiers are "absolutely not", "no", "eh", "yes", and "yes!" In retrospect, we probably only needed three tiers ("no", "yes", "yes!"), but having five does make the graphs you're about to see more interesting. And at the beginning we didn't know we would get any "yes!" stories. We thought we might have to publish "yes" stories with some "eh" for filler.

In terms of the world-famous Context of Rejection, I'd say tier A corresponds to 1 through 5, tier B is 6 through 8, tier C is 9 through 11, tier D is 12 and 13, tier E is 14. There's some overlap and it's not a perfect match, since the CoR is for novels, but you get the picture. The inflection point is between 11 and 12, the difference between "I could see someone publishing this" and "We should publish this".

Getting back to the process: Sumana flags certain stories in tier C for my attention, and I also read all D and E stories. Sumana and I have many differences of opinion but we've never differed by more than one tier. We talk about the stories. The fruits of our discussion get turned into feedback for the authors. Sumana makes occasional passes over the pending stories and sends out rejection letters.

Currently we've sent out rejection notices for tiers A through C, and for most of D. We've bought one story and we're left with about 25 that we really want to publish. Now is a good time to mention that we're going to publish more stories than the originally-planned five, but not too many more. Certainly not 25. So we need to cull that herd. We're trying to decide on a good mix of stories, which might mean sacrificing an E story for a D--and we're not going to be able to publish all the E stories anyway, as you'll see if you look at the graph below.

The fitness function works well for focusing quickly on the relatively small number of stories that really stand out to us. But it's not so good for scientific purposes because it conflates a lot of variables: technical skill, inventiveness of plot, vividness of character, adjacence to our personal tastes in spec-fic, etc.

For instance, all the terribly-written stories ended up in tier A, but so did most of the horror stories we got, regardless of quality. I said in the submission guidelines that I was open to horror if it was clever, but it turns out I wouldn't know clever horror if it rose from the grave and bit me in the ass with decaying teeth held together only by metal-amalgam fillings. Some especially well-written horror got into tier B, and one really funny zombie story clawed its way into tier C. Long story short, there'll be no horror (the genre, not the emotion) in TE. It turns out that's not what we want to publish.

Another example: we got an extraordinarily well-written story that had no fantastic element in it at all. It went into tier D, not because we wanted to publish it, but because it seemed like a wasted opportunity not to publish something by this person. We made inquiries and got a less mainstream flash story from this person, which we're considering offering to buy for half price. So really, that should have been a tier A story, but we used tier D as a shorthand for "do something about this."

So here it is, the graph you've all been waiting for. How many stories went into each tier? What does the slush pile look like?

This is going to get really unscientific, because what we start out with is our subjective opinions of the stories. But I think there's some interesting stuff in this graph.

This has more than a passing resemblance to a normal curve. Of course, if it were a normal curve, there's a missing tier to the left. It would look more like a normal curve if we split tier A into two tiers, one for terribly-written stories and one for stories that were just extraordinarily incongruent with our tastes. I'm glad we didn't do this, because the correct response in both cases is prompt rejection, but it's an interesting observation.

It's a category error to try to do statistics on the tiers, but what the hell. Let's assign a tier A story 0 points and a tier E story 4 points. Then the mean tier is about 1.54, halfway between tier B ("at least it's grammatical...") and tier C ("might be publishable, but not by us"). So, yes, indeed, if you write a story that is grammatical and tells a coherent story, your story is above average.

What's the interpretation of this graph? Is the "slush pile" really an endless flood of terrible stories? Well, that's a writer's way of phrasing the question. Writers try to write "good" stories and think that "good" stories should be published. But the editor's fitness function is a lot more complex than "good". A lot of stories published in big-name mags in the 70s and 80s couldn't get published today.[0] Did they become "bad" over time, or did the fitness function change? I think a lot of boring stuff gets published, but clearly the relevant slush readers and editors found those same stories "good".

But however you slice it, most of the 241 stories we were sent did very poorly on our fitness function. Only 39 made us think "it would be cool to publish this" for any extended period. So I would say that going through the slush pile is indeed a chore, just as editors say. For Sumana it was a demanding full-time job. But it's not an unrewarding chore. It's not some post-apocalyptic wasteland where you scrounge for a precious tin of canned meat. There's a lot of really good stuff in the slush pile.

Let's take a look at the good stuff. Here's a graph of the 39 stories in D and E, after our first round of culling. After this point, the boundaries between D and E grow fuzzy. Objectively speaking, we have a resistance to rejecting any more of these stories, because we've been dithering over it for a while now.

This is saying nothing more than "we've rejected about half of the tier D stories", but it's nice to have a visual. Sumana and I really liked all these stories, but a lot of them haven't even made it this far, and the vast majority of the remainder will ultimately be collecting another rejection note. By the principle of reversion to the mean, the next editor they're sent to probably won't like them as much as we did. It's possible that some of these stories will never be published. So I think my hypothesis is confirmed: not only is there too much science fiction, there's too much good science fiction.

Maybe we're softies. Maybe these stories aren't really that good. Well, we can do cross-checks. The Context of Rejection says 60-75% of the submissions will be in CoR levels 1-7. We're not an established print market like Tor, we're not in those big "writer's guide" books, so we didn't get as many crazies as Tor does. Maybe that's why only 50% of our stories are in tiers A and B. But maybe we were too lenient and a lot of tier C stories correspond to CoR 6 and 7.

CoR says 95-99% of the submissions are at 10 or below. Well, only 84% of our submissions were in tier C or below, so again, maybe we were too lenient. Maybe we should only be considering the stories in tier E. That's the top 5% of the stories. So maybe we're softies, maybe the rules are different for stories vs. novels, maybe the incredible technical sophistication required to use the Internet filtered out all but the most forward-looking writers. In any event, we're not off by orders of magnitude. We're about 10 percentage points off from the guidelines given in the Context of Rejection. And since we started having difficulties after rejecting 90% of the stories, we're in compliance with Sturgeon's Law.

5% of 241 stories is 11 stories. That's twice as many as we originally planned to publish, and more than we're going to publish even now that we've expanded the anthology. There are way too many stories we don't want to publish, but also too many stories that we do want to publish. Or to look at it another way, there are not enough well-paying markets, and not enough editors with different tastes.

This is why I specifically asked for stories that had been rejected multiple times. I wanted to see whether there were stories that I would really like, but that get consistently overlooked. This is also (one reason) why I ignored people who said my choice of Creative Commons license, or some other aspect of the way I was doing things, would scare away all the talented writers. Honestly, I think the Creative Commons thing scared off more untalented writers than talented ones.

I can see how editors might not want to go this deep into the analysis with aspiring writers. I don't want to do anything that would discourage people from submitting stories. But it seems quite possible to write a great story, send it to twenty editors who all love it, and get twenty rejections, because there's too much good stuff. A great story will get nicer rejections than if you'd sent in a scrap of paper on which you'd written in pencil "MAN HAVE SPACEGUN. explode!! NOW IS SAVE"[1] But from a monetary and publication-credit standpoint, it's the same.

Next time: what to do about this. Assuming I can figure out what to do about this. Anyway, back to work. Editors with more experience can tell me if I'm out of line.

PS: I will not tell you which tier we put your story in. Seriously. It can only cause pain for everyone to act like two peoples' sorting mechanism is some reductive measure of your story's worth. If we have specific critiques, we offer them when we reject the story. Use the feedback or ignore it, and try to sell the story to someone else with different opinions. Tier data is only interesting in the aggregate, as a measure of how we responded to the slush pile as a whole.

Example of how subjective this is: someone sent us a tier A story. I don't remember what story or what we didn't like about it. Rejected. They sent us another story. Again, I don't remember anything about the story--I just saw this pattern when running random queries on the submission database. Tier B. Better than the first, but still not what we want. Rejected. Then they sent another story. Man, how long is this person going to torment us with stories we don't want? Tier E. It's an awesome story and we're very likely to buy it. So what right do we have to imply that their first story was "bad"? Because I can put in all the caveats I want, but that's the message that will come through. More pragmatically, would we have gotten the third story if we had implied that?

[0] Sumana would frequently say of a story, "This would be a great story for Asimov's in 1981." That is, someone else (in another time) might publish it, but not us. Tier C.

[1] I figured I might as well publish this online, since Analog wouldn't take it.

OK, Thoughtcrime Experiments is closed to submissions, and it's time to buy some stories. As an appendix to the anthology I'm going to publish an essay about the process. This has been a really good and interesting experience for Sumana and me. And although it's been extremely time-consuming, so far it's not been difficult.

When you're a writer, even a writer in a writing group, you only have a small picture of the market. Editing this anthology is giving me a much wider view, and it's also making me a better writer. So basically, if you have the time, I think you should liberate some stories and put out your own anthology.

On the TE website I say that TE is an experiment "to see how difficult it is to find five stories I like enough to buy." This is true enough, but it's only part of the story. As in any experiment involving human beings, the subjects (you) were not told the full purpose of the experiment. The goal of Thoughtcrime Experiments is to test the truth of certain things I've been told about the market for short science fiction. I don't yet have the data to talk about this in more detail, but I do have some raw numbers and some initial impressions, which I'll share with you.

This graph shows submissions per day.

We got our first submission on December 30th, 2008. Between then and the end of yesterday ("the end of yesterday" interpreted rather liberally), we got 240 submissions from 202 authors. The mean number of submissions per day was 5.0 in January and 6.7 in February. 24 people submitted two stories, five people submitted three, and one person submitted four. (Persistence paid off: story #4 is under strong consideration.)

There were three peaks in submissions. The first happened just after we were listed in ralan.com on January 1st. The second happened just after I posted to the specficmarkets community on Livejournal. Our busiest day was, as you'd expect, the last day we were open, when we got 16 submissions. This isn't Strange Horizons territory; they get over 500 submissions in a month. But it's more than I expected.

Was it enough? Enough to get five really good stories? We don't have all the data on subjectively determined story quality--we still have to evaluate 25 stories starting from the 14th--so I can't put up a graph right now, but the answer is yes. About twenty of the 215 submissions we've evaluated are stories Sumana and I have a positive desire to publish--not "someone else might like this", not "could be great with some work", not "could go in if we don't get anything better." Damn good stories that need some minor edits or a thousand words cut, if anything.

In one sense, that's a very small number--about ten percent. But it's much higher than what editors' horror stories had led me to believe. I was expecting a deluge of random crap from crazy people written in HTML crayon, hilariously bad Eye of Argon type stories, stories that had been sitting in the author's desk drawer for twenty years. In actual fact we got one crazy person, one Argon-class story, and near as I can tell one desk-drawer story (and it was pretty good!).

In maybe a week, once we've got all the stories evaluated, I'll put up more objective data on our impressions of the stories (which are of course, subjective; I mean "objective" in the sense that there will be graphs).

Oh, another thing I didn't tell you. The anthology will have art! We went to some of our favorite artists and told them, basically, "draw something awesome." It's still in flux so I don't know how many pieces there will be, but we're hoping for at least five, and we've already bought finished pieces from Internet faves Patrick Farley and Erin Ptah. Unfortunately a number of my other Internet faves were too busy or didn't respond. (Josh Lesnick, if you read this, there's still time!) But the stuff we've commissioned already will BLOW YOU AWAY. Or, more accurately, will DEPICT YOU BEING BLOWN AWAY.

PS: Props to the friend of ours who sent us a story in LaTeX format.

Update: BLOWN AWAY.

From a nebulous March 31st-or-when-filled to a solid, definite February 15th. I'll put up some more specific stats when we close, but the abstract is that we have a lot of high-quality stories to choose from, to the point where it would be cruel to keep those authors waiting another two months. But in our relentless, Javert-esque pursuit of excellence, we want to have to make even more difficult decisions about which stories to publish.

So we're giving you some time to get a rejection letter for your most recent story from a publication that doesn't know what it's missing, and then pirouette around and send the story in to us. Besides which, a definite date feels right, in a way that "sorry, we're closed, didn't you hear?" doesn't. Once again, here are the guidelines.

Oh yeah. I learned this lesson very quickly. Editors don't care about your cover letters. (nb. I speak only for editors who are me.)

Seriously. I never agonize over my cover letters when I send out stories, I keep 'em nice and generic, but I always mention my sale(s, hopefully) and my VP attendance, thinking they'll count for something. Now I feel like all that is vanity.

On the guidelines page I say that if you want, you can mention stuff like publication credits and your name. Some people are taking this way too far! I'm getting multi-page cover letters. I don't need this information. I'm buying a story, which you've thoughtfully attached to the message. I'm not hiring you to run Accounts Payable.

But you could shrink the cover letter down and down to the length of my typical cover letter ("Hi, here's a story; one time I sold a different story; well, gotta go!") and it would still have more information than I need. Because stuff in the cover letter is stuff that's external to the story. (Hopefully.) There will be plenty of time for that kind of thing after I buy your story.

One thing I've found I do like in a cover letter is when you show that you've read the submission guidelines. I mean, most of us are used to sending form cover letters in with our stories and getting form rejection letters back. It's nice to be reminded that there are real people on both ends of the process. But on the whole it seems a semi-archaic practice, like calling cards. Maybe I'd feel differently if I ran a regular magazine and had a chance to build up long-term relationships with authors.

So I got an email which deals with a topic not explored on this weblog for some years: the minutiae of various Creative Commons licenses. Specifically, the chilling effect that my choice of a BY-NC-SA license for Thoughtcrime Experiments might have on authors who don't want their stories hacked into derivative works. I would like to hear the thoughts of random people who read this weblog entry.

I chose BY-NC-SA for Thoughtcrime Experiments for three reasons: 1. that's the license Cory Doctorow uses, and it works out pretty well for him; 2. translations and adaptations to different media are prohibited under BY-NC-ND, and I want those to happen; 3. if you say it fast it sounds like "By NCSA", which makes whatever you're doing sound high-tech.

I also have a philosophical problem with BY-NC-ND which is that it doesn't enrich the commons beyond decriminalizing the act of copying. Imagine if it were suddenly okay to copy all those orphan works from the 20th (and by now the 21st) century. That'd be great news because large organizations could legally digitize all that stuff and we wouldn't lose it to Stanislaw Lem's paper-eating bacterium. But you still couldn't really interact with it until the copyright expired; it'd feel like it was behind glass. That's what BY-NC-ND feels like.

(Actually I'm being a bit hypocritical here because I originally put "Mallory" under BY-NC-ND, but I think I've talked myself out of that now, so I'll change it unless someone talks me back into it soon.)

So that's why I chose BY-ND-SA for Thoughtcrime Experiments. I'm interested in hearing additional arguments pro or con. Also note that I'm okay with negotiating the license even on the level of individual stories, though BY-NC-ND really is the baseline (otherwise it gets really confusing).

Pragmatically, I think most of the hypothetical undesirable uses of your work take place in a copyright grey area anyway, and won't be deterred by your choice of ND instead of SA. But I understand that pragmatism is not the main driver of peoples' (including my) feelings about this.

As my Christmas present to the Internet I'm soliciting submissions for a new speculative fiction anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments. Sumana will read slush, I'll select and edit the stories, and we'll publish online under a Creative Commons license.

If you're a spec-fic writer, and there's some story that people you've shown it to have liked, but that you've been unable to find a publisher for, send it to me. If I like the story enough to spend $200 on it, I'll buy it for $200. I hope to buy five stories. Details at the anthology page. Rationale follows.

I've been in a writing group for over a year, and read about thirty stories and a novel because of it. I've mentioned before that half the stories are "a rewrite away from publication quality". What does that mean, really? It means I could easily imagine reading those fifteen stories in a magazine or anthology. But of those fifteen stories, there are only two I want to buy for three cents a word and publish myself.[0] It's different when it's your own money.

Thoughtcrime Experiments is an an experiment with my own money. How hard is it to find five stories that I really want to buy? Given those stories, how hard is it to put together an anthology people will want to read? At the tor.com holiday meetup I cornered Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Joseph Adams, and asked them whether my plan was feasible.

My takeaway from those conversations is that the toughest part of putting together an anthology is A) getting some "name" writers to promise to contribute stories to anchor the anthology[1], and B) getting a publishing deal.[2] Well, I don't need either of those to consider this project a success, so let's do this. Send your best unpublished story to thoughtcrime.experiments@gmail.com. I'll start promoting this anthology more in the new year, when people come back from vacation and start paying attention again, but it's open for submissions now.

I'm also going to try to write a story for John's current anthology, "Federations", and a pro market wants me to do a rewrite on a different story (yes!). So, busy vacation.

[0] I think one of those stories has sold, as has the novel.

[1] At VPXI Elizabeth Bear told the story of how she broke into the relatively-big time by filling in for a name writer who'd flaked out on an anthology promise. And then eventually found herself being the name writer and flaking out on anthology promises of her own, leaving room for other up-and-coming writers.

[2] Anthology creation, at least the way John does it, seems like you nail down the name contributors, pitch the book to a publisher using the name writers as collateral, put everything together, send out the checks, and submit the manuscript. For some reason I always imagined someone at the publisher coming up with the anthology idea and gathering the stories. But it's more like a novel that you subcontract out.